Climate change is scary. But don’t let this stop you from having children.

Climate change is scary. The implications of climate change are frightening. Recent reportThe Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change highlighted last week how alarming it is. Warning of the risk that many species around the world will become extinct by 2100, it also urged us to prepare for the increased risks of floods, malnutrition and food insecurity, waterborne diseases and a whole host of things including “irreversible and severe losses of ecosystem services and biodiversity” in the Amazon basin. And that’s just given 2°C of warming above pre-industrial levels – we’ve already experienced about 1.1°C and more is baked in.

It’s understandable that people are worried – so much so that climate change might be why some are Avoid having children.

That’s not the only reason why birth rates are down, of course. There are many – in Britain, for example, there are unaffordable housing prices, the huge cost of childcare and a lack of support for working parents.

There have been many stories recently that people are avoiding becoming parents due to the world they will live in. Morgan Stanley, financial analysts Last summer, investors were warned that the “movement to not have children owing to fears over climate change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline”.

Meanwhile, Dr Britt Wray, a human and planetary health fellow at Stanford University in the US, said last year that “fear of a degraded future due to climate change” is The West is experiencing a decline in birth rates.

People are worried about more than their children living in dangerous and harsh environments. They also fret about the impact that having a child will have on the climate – 60% of young Americans were surveyed said that they were worried about the “carbon footprint of procreation”, as well as about the well-being of any current or future children.

It’s understandable. But that doesn’t mean it’s right. If you don’t want to have children, then that’s fine. However, if you are interested in having children,Do want to have children, but are denying yourself because of the fear of climate change, or the fear of making it worse, then many experts will reassure that this would be a mistake – it’s OK to have kids.

“There are two dimensions to this,” says Dr Hannah RitchieOur World in Data is headed of research by Dr. Michael Sullivan, an environmental scientist. “One is that you shouldn’t have children because their future will be so bad that it’s not ethical to bring them into the world. The other is you shouldn’t because they’ll have an impact on the climate. And I don’t like either.”

The future isn’t all bad

Ritchie points out that many of the climate scientists she knows are mothers of young children. “There’s a disconnect,” she says, “between the general public who have this worry, and the climate scientists, who are more aware than anyone of the risks. If the people who study this every day are still having kids, that should be a signal that the risk to children isn’t that high.”

To be clear: it’s true that climate change will probably make life worse than it would otherwise have been. If there was no climate change, there would likely be fewer floods, more diseases, and fewer wildfires and droughts.

But the question is not “will the world be worse?” but “will the world be so bad that you’d rather not be born into it?” – and that seems very unlikely. Even the IPCC’s more severe projections, with temperature rises above 4°C, talk about more severe floods and droughts, heatwaves and so on. These are terrible things. But they don’t talk about the collapse of civilisation or the extinction of humanity.

Climate change is likely to have the worst impact on the poorest countries. However, most people who worry about having children are in the West, which will be less affected by climate change. It’s very unlikely that climate change will mean that children in the UK will have worse lives than, say, their grandparents did, and no one thinks that the Baby Boomer generation would rather not have been born.

And there’s a countervailing force: the world is getting richer. “For the poorest countries, being richer and more resilient is key,” says Ritchie.

Let’s take Bangladesh as an extreme example. As the climate warms, we worry about Bangladesh becoming submerged by sea-level rise. The Netherlands has about a third under water. It is a rich country, so it can manage that problem with pumps and dykes. Bangladesh is You can try to, but because it is much poorer, that’s more difficult. It is however becoming more wealthy fast due to global trade and better technology. As the seas rise, it’ll be better equipped to deal with it as will the rest. All of the IPCC’s scenarios, even the most severe, Take it as a given Despite the fact that economies will continue growing, growth is slower in the worst cases.

Fast facts: Concerns for tomorrow

A survey of 10,000 young people in 10 countries found that more that half believed that “humanity is doomed”. The research was published in The Lancet, called for more mental health support for “children facing a future severely damaged by climate change”.

In a country with high income, the average woman has just 1.6 childrenAccording to the World Bank, she will have 2.1 children in her lifetime. This is significantly lower than the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman.

If energy use in the developing world rose to the same amount that the average person in Europe consumes, the world’s total energy production would need to Triple.

Having children won’t make much difference

2017 saw a lot of attention on this topic A studyIt claimed that not having children was one the most important things you can do to reduce your carbon footprint. It suggested that one less child would reduce your emissions by nearly 60 tonnes CO.₂Per year.

However, according to Dr Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute, and himself the father of a young daughter: “Kids consume a lot less than adults do. If you’re driving your kid in your car, the marginal impact of driving the kid is quite small. Heating your house, driving places – these are things we do anyway.”

Obviously there are exceptions – after writing this, I will drive my son to his football training, and I wouldn’t have done that if he didn’t exist. He has less impact on the world than me, in general.

The question, of course, is whether he’ll have a bigger impact when he’s a grown-up. The 2017 study assumed that each child would be responsible at the same rate as their parents and that it would continue to have children which would do the exact same.

But, says Hausfather, if that’s true, then we’ve failed. “If we don’t achieve net zero in the next 40 years, we’re not solving the problem whether or not we have fewer kids.” Luckily, we’re making extraordinary progress with renewable energy, and it’s very likely that we will have zero or close to zero net emissions by then. My son’s children will very probably be living carbon-free lives (or something really bad will have happened).

Ritchie points out that, in addition, the West simply can’t reduce population quickly enough to make a difference. Even if almost everyone in rich nations stopped having children now, it would be unlikely to make much difference to the total population – the entire West only has a population of about a billion, and our birth rates are already below replacement levels.

“If we reduce the birth rates by a little bit in rich countries, it won’t make much difference,” she says. “To combat climate change we need a low-carbon economy and a low-carbon world, large-scale solutions for billions of people. It might make a difference if [we go down to] one billion people, but the difference between eight and nine billion doesn’t really register.”

That’s especially true because the developing world is catching up fast – which is a good thing – and its population is still increasing. “It’s going to be poor and middle-income countries that drive the future emissions in a world in which we don’t leapfrog fossil fuels,” says Hausfather. “That doesn’t mean countries like the US or UK have no responsibilities, but if we want India or Indonesia or sub-Saharan Africa to not build coal [power stations] we have to give them cheaper alternatives – solar, nuclear, hydrogen. The important thing is to make [green] energy cheap.”

Children are an inspiration to improve the world.

The cost of renewable energy is now extremely affordable. One watt of solar-electricity-generating capacity cost about $100 (£75) in 1976; it’s less than half a cent now. 2020 The International Energy Agency declared that solar was “the cheapest electricity in history”.

That has meant that even though political progress has sometimes been slow, the world’s demand for fossil fuels is slowing and will soon decline. That’s becoming clear in the IPCC’s scenarios. “People still have in their heads that we’re heading towards five, six, seven degrees of warming,” says Ritchie. “But the scenarios we’re looking at now are just not there. The current policy path heading for 2.7°C. That’s too high, but there’s still potential to bring it down significantly.

“There are reasons to be reasonably optimistic, with the technological progress, how quickly it’s happening, how quickly prices are falling. We’re moving in a positive direction and things are speeding up.”

If you didn’t think that – if you thought things were just stagnant or getting worse – then it might make sense to panic, but the world is finding solutions.

Ritchie and Hausfather both make a deeper philosophical point: Who are we doing this for? “If we’re not having kids, then who are we?” says Hausfather. “What are we saving the planet for? In the end we’re leaving a better world for our children, and that means having them.” Ritchie agrees: “If we’re saying we need to combat climate change for future generations, it’s strange to not reproduce so we haven’t Get future generations.”

Climate change is a scary thing. But it’s not so bad that we need to give up on the future.